7 September—The surprising news today is that early this morning (12:01 Eastern Daylight Time, to be exact) Boeing’s Starliner space capsule, called the Calypso, landed safely in the New Mexico desert. So since New Mexico’s time zone, Mountain Daylight Time, is a couple of hours behind Eastern, you could say that Calypso actually landed yesterday. Maybe you should.

Sure, Calypso was three months late returning to Earth and came back without the passengers who were supposed to be aboard but had been held on the space station for their own safety (understandably, given Boeing’s rap sheet). But the capsule landed safely and no lives were lost or even endangered. Except on the space station, for which Boeing was the primary contractor.

You must be thinking, was Calypso the capsule named after the highly syncopated Trinidadian music or the Greek nymph? You decide. Grown-ups will recall that calypso music was very popular in the late 1950s.

But not too many people of any age will recall that in Homer’s Odyssey Calypso was the beautiful daughter of the Titan Atlas and the sea nymph Pleione, making her a minor goddess herself. But she had supported the wrong side—her father—in the First Titan War, so she was forced to live by herself on a little island called Ogygia and rescue sailors. What a life.

(Irrelevant but material: Both the Atlas and Titan ICBMs were developed from the Nazi V-2. The British Navy had two HMS Sea Nymphs, the first an 18th-century cutter, the second a World War II submarine scrapped in 1948. Why can’t the U.S. Navy come up with good names? Pleione, on the other hand, is a line of women’s clothing.)

So Odysseus found himself shipwrecked on Ogygia, and Calypso rescued him. The big guy wanted to get back to his faithful wife Penelope in Ithaca (where he also wanted to finish his degree at Cornell). But poor, understandably lonely Calypso wouldn’t let him off her tight little island for seven years, and then only after the gods made her spring him. It probably wasn’t all that bad for Odysseus, though, as Calypso gave him good sex, just as Circe had done earlier—but only after turning his crew into pigs.

In other news, then, conservative Republican former congresswoman Liz Cheney, having broadcast a few days ago that she’d be voting for liberal Democrat Kamala Harris in November, didn’t surprise anyone when she followed that up yesterday with the revelation that her conservative Republican father, former VEEP Dick Cheney, would be doing likewise. That’s what good fathers do, after all. Or should.

On the other hand, given the secret ballot, you never know how anybody votes. Except with mail-in ballots. Look forward to Donald Trump’s vituperative reaction. Kudos to Liz, Dick, and probably all the other Cheneys. Too bad Nikki Haley didn’t stick to her guns. She and Liz would have been a winning ticket.

And before leaving Harris and Trump, we’ve been seeing a lot of references to Kamala Harris as a Marxist liberal. Now, she certainly has lots of negatives. But calling Harris a Marxist is like calling Trump a businessman . . .